Court Clears Santander in $751K Crypto Scam

When Lourenco Garcia wired $751,000 from his Santander accounts in late 2021, he believed the money would buy cryptocurrency on CoinEgg—a platform he thought legitimate. Instead, it vanished into one of the year’s slicker digital‑asset frauds. Garcia sued, arguing Santander should have flagged the wire requests, stopped them, and saved him from himself. Two years and two judicial decisions later, a Massachusetts appellate panel has delivered the blunt verdict: authorized means authorized.

The transfers no one stopped

Over six weeks, Garcia approved nine transactions—two debit‑card buys and seven wires—to New York‑based Metropolitan Commercial Bank, where the funds were converted through Crypto.com before hitting CoinEgg. Only after he discovered CoinEgg was a phantom exchange did he notify Santander. His lawsuit claimed breach of contract, negligent misrepresentation, and a violation of the state’s consumer‑protection statute.

What the court saw

Judges homed in on Santander’s customer agreement. The language says the bank may intervene on suspicious activity but is under no affirmative duty to monitor or block every risky move a client makes. Marketing lines promising to “contact customers about questionable transactions” were deemed mere puffery, not binding policy. Crucially, regulators in Massachusetts have not imposed a blanket obligation for banks to police crypto‑linked wires.

Garcia’s argument—banks should act as a failsafe against self‑authorized scams—met a wall. The court noted that imposing such a duty could choke legitimate commerce and saddle banks with impossible predictive burdens. Result: all claims dismissed, appeal denied.

Industry implications

The verdict arrives as U.S. regulators tighten the screws on digital‑asset markets and banks refine their gloves‑off stance. Institutions increasingly lean on explicit contract clauses to fence off liability for customer‑initiated crypto activity. Victims, meanwhile, discover that once transfers clear—the hallmark feature of blockchain’s finality—legal recourse narrows to chasing bad actors across borders.

Scams scaling up

Garcia’s case is minor compared with 2025’s carnage. DappRadar pegs Q1 rug‑pull losses at nearly $6 billion, a staggering 6,499 % leap year‑on‑year, thanks largely to the Mantra debacle that swallowed $5.5 billion in one gulp. The lesson: consumer vigilance lags far behind scammer innovation, and courts will not easily reassign the cost of that gap to banks.

Santander’s victory does not excuse inertia in fraud prevention, but it sets a precedent: banks are facilitators, not guardians of crypto ventures. For investors wiring life savings into the digital frontier, the last protective click belongs to them—not the institution sending the funds.